Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment

Convergences: Inventories of the Present

by Akeel Bilgrami

Bringing clarity to a subject clouded by polemic, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment is a rigorous exploration of how secularism and identity emerged as concepts in different parts of the modern world. At a time when secularist and religious worldviews appear irreconcilable, Akeel Bilgrami strikes out on a path distinctly his own, criticizing secularist proponents and detractors, liberal universalists and multicultural relativists alike.

Those who ground secularism in arguments that aspire to universal reach, Bilgrami argues, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of politics. To those, by contrast, who regard secularism as a mere outgrowth of colonial domination, he offers the possibility of a more conceptually vernacular ground for political secularism. Focusing on the response to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses , Bilgrami asks why Islamic identity has so often been a mobilizing force against liberalism, and he answers the question with diagnostic sympathy, providing a philosophical framework within which the Islamic tradition might overcome the resentments prompted by its colonized past and present.

Turning to Gandhi's political and religious thought, Bilgrami ponders whether the increasing appeal of religion in many parts of the world reflects a growing disillusionment not with science but with an outlook of detachment around the rise of modern science and capitalism. He elaborates a notion of enchantment along metaphysical, ethical, and political lines with a view to finding in secular modernity a locus of meaning and value, while addressing squarely the anxiety that all such notions hark back nostalgically to a time that has past.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Akeel Bilgrami [(born 1950)] is an Indian-born philosopher of language and of mind, and the author of Belief and Meaning, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity (forthcoming), as well as various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Some of his articles in these latter subjects speak to issues of current politics in their relation to broader social and cultural issues. He has also increasingly joined debates in the pages of larger-circulation periodicals such as The New York Review of Books and The Nation. He has two upcoming books, "What is a Muslim?" and "Gandhi the Philosopher". Bilgrami is currently the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York.

Bilgrami received a degree in English Literature from Bombay University before switching to philosophy. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, leaving with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Chicago with a dissertation titled "Belief and Meaning", focusing on Michael Dummett's critique of realist accounts of meaning and on the indeterminacy of translation, in which he argues in support of Donald Davidson's thesis that meaning is a form of invariance between underdetermined theories of meaning. (He was supervised by Davidson while at Chicago.) He has been in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University since 1985 after spending two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Bilgrami is a secularist and an atheist who advocates an understanding of the community-oriented dimension of religion. For Bilgrami spiritual yearnings are not only understandable but also supremely human. He has argued in many essays that in our modern world, "religion is not primarily a matter of belief and doctrine but about the sense of community and shared values it provides in contexts where other forms of solidarity—such as a strong labor movement—are missing."

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Hamza Sarfraz · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are a brilliant set of essays. I will return to this book again and again.